The Birdcage shows all the ways that gender is a performance through its rapid-fire wit and absurd situations, shying away from the preachiness you might expect of a comedy about conservatives forced to face their fears of all things queer. It’s all the more impressive that the central joke of the 1996 movie is that Albert can’t manage to pass as straight, not even for the benefit of his son’s fiancée’s extremely conservative family. It’s hard to even imagine Nathan Lane as unconfident about anything in his life, especially when it comes to his melodramatic, hilarious portrayal of drag queen Starina (and her alter-ego, the not-so-mild-mannered Albert) in The Birdcage - but Lane was still in the closet at the time.
Image: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/United Artists
